


No Arbitrage

by ebonynemesis



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship, mcu only backstory, reference to the Infinity Wars trailer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 14:18:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14058798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ebonynemesis/pseuds/ebonynemesis
Summary: For the BuckyNat prompt: 'a series of escalating bets.'





	No Arbitrage

‘Bet you I can jump that far.’ Six-year-old Steve, shivering with fever, turned to him with wet face and wet eyes, his gangly frame barely able to support himself, unable to even make the slanted roof beneath him creak from his negligible bodyweight. 

‘Steve-o, no.’ He was the older one, the bigger sibling, supposed to be the voice of reason, but that voice was cut up by the brisk wind between his roof and Steve’s.   
  
So Steve jumped, didn’t quite make it, and Bucky managed to catch him by the wrist which he was able to encircle in his grip as sheets of ice broke off from the scramble and roused a cloud of snow dust beneath them in the ground.   
  
Steve scrambled up, nimble if for the lack of strength.   
  
‘Told you.’ He dusted shards of broken ice from his patched and fraying pants.   
  
Bucky doesn’t remember how they got down but that feeling of nausea, like he was going to vomit up his heart at the instance of the leap, that’s what triggered the flashback. Moment of clarity so crisp like winter wind on the slanted rooftop of Brooklyn. 

 

*

 

He later says the same to Steve, on the roof of a train throttling through an impossibly snowy Swiss mountain pass, and doesn’t make it.  


*

  
‘Bet you I can do it.’ He overheard the redhead say, it broke his attention away from the combat at hand as he turned to look.   
  
She was tall for an eleven year old, towering above her friends who would all overtake her by the time she was fourteen. He heard a scoff from the blonde whom the redhead was addressing, but couldn’t see the expression.   
  
He waited for the supervisor to come over and hit the girls for chatting and lecture them on the fact that their line of profession was unsuited for bets—warranting something they couldn’t back. But no one came. So the redhead goes, her waist willow soft, forming a bridge as she stretched backwards until her chin was pointing at the ceiling and her hands touched the ground.   
  
Would’ve been impressive had it not been for the fact that this was the red-room, he thought, but she wasn’t done.   
  
From the position her legs kicked up as she formed a headstand, her arms and face straining, then as the room around her fell silent, she widened her legs slightly and raised one arm off the ground, forming a strange asterix with her limbs.  
  
‘Natalia!’ The teacher finally bellowed, ‘Stand up this once.’

Her recovery was not nearly as elegant, the joint overbending upon her release. Bucky caught a glimpse of a grimace before the sharp face pulled back into tight nonchalance, though the quiver of her wrist betraying the façade.

‘Out.’ Finger tipped in red, pointed at the door.

She passed him on her way out, and even in the palimpsest of erased memories he would remember the sharp upturned nose, the defiant eyes, and those words, etched upon memories of Steve and winter, dripping with red.

 

*

 

Move. He thought.

His arm was aligned, guidance for the trajectory of his gun, the sunlight gleamed off the outstretched in light vectors tangenting off the metal. The unpart of his brain—the not-him—compelling the rest of his body to comply, his scope zooming past the auburn hair, focusing on his target behind her.

She scanned for him, for a moment he thought she had discovered his position but her head whipped past him without pause. The man behind her cowering as she kept her hand firmly on the forearm. Her body and the corners of the walls forming a perfect obstructed triangle of protection.

‘Bet you won’t take the shot.’ She said. Though blurry he was still able to pick up how her lips smirked in his scope.

A moment of lapse, a flash of familiar syntax, a lax from the hold on his thoughts, but only for a split moment because the program that controlled him was flawed but not ineffectual, and his fingers squeezed the trigger as the round drilled through the air, drilled into her stomach as she doubled over, Blood painting red lips dark, and the target behind her was dead before the release.

Told ya, he mouthed, as he watched her collapse on one knee, eyes still scanning for him.

 

*

 

In Wakanda where the air is hot and dry but the winds blew cool from the snow-caps she studied him, her hair ash-blonde, her sharp-tipped nose turned up slightly. Steve noticed them and bristled physically, Bucky could see his shoulders squaring beneath the despangled uniform.

But Natasha Romanoff’s lips quirked as she touched him on his arm, her eyes only half interested, the same expression she held as she inspected those ridiculous rhinos clad in armour just a moment earlier.

‘Bet you don’t remember me.’

His stomach caved at the sudden pain, a reminder of the missing parts that made him halfway human. From the corner of his eyes a movement that indicated Steve’s approach.

Bucky returned her touch with one to her wrist, where the sprain would have formed from the handstand.

Her face freezes, gray eyes widening.

‘Bet you don’t either.’ He let go, before Steve managed to approach them, arms tensed, ready to restrain.

 

*

 

Steve’s eyes flash golden as he catches the descending gauntlet, and Bucky watches as the pinnacle of man slowly crumbles as the purple being towers above them, looking almost bored what the little effort he’s exerting.

They’re the only ones left, T’challa’s armies are elsewhere, probably dying as well, across the globe Stark is missing and the rest of what earth has for defence pebbles trying to hold back a ocean tide. Bucky thinks about the kindness of the king and the nation and the planet that found it in them to accept him as one of their own. 

They have been backed into a literal corner in the debris, only a matter of time before the gauntlet crushes them as well like it did to Steve. 

In the haze his vision blurs, phantom pains shooting up where his arm would have been decades ago. Beside him she’s bleeding, a waft of copper from fresh wounds. Her face as pale as her hair, her lips pressed thin, paper white. 

There’s a dark patch where blood has caked on the strands of her hair above the temple, Bucky can’t tell whether it’s hers or not, and though fear slowly manifests in those eyes she doesn’t blink, or look away.

We’re not going to make it.

She doesn’t have to say those words for him to see it in her eyes.

His finger closes around the edge of Steve’s discarded shield, the metal so familiar to him, once a part of his flesh, his body strumming with the resonance of the vibranium as his heart thuds, trying to push into his throat, palpatating blood through his body, like the first time he saw Steve almost stack it on that rooftop in Brooklyn.

‘Bet you we live.’ He says, and leaps.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr: ebonynemesis.tumblr.com


End file.
